We decided to display the decades of the singer’s career in numbers and graphs.
Since the release of her debut album in 1983 (the album was called “Madonna”), the singer has
made 10 world tours.
More than 300 million of her records have been sold in the world on all existing media formats:
cassettes, CDs, and records, as well as in the form of digital copies.
Thanks to this record, Madonna was in the Guinness Book of Records as the most commercially
successful singer in the history of the recording industry.
What other numbers describe the Queen of the Pop phenomenon?
1. Madonna’s albums have reached number one on the UK charts more than any
other female artist.
12 discs by Madonna hit the top of the charts. Only the Beatles and Elvis Presley achieved more.
The greatest hits collection Immaculate Collection, released in 1990, stayed on the charts for 338
weeks (6.5 years). At the same time, he headed the hit parade for more than two months.
2. People love Madonna’s songs from the 80s the most.
If you ask: “What do you know from Madonna’s repertoire?” – for many, the song Like A Virgin
will be the first to come to mind. According to the streaming service Spotify, this 1984
composition remains Madonna’s favorite song among its users.
Of Madonna’s top five most popular songs, only one was not written in the 1980s – this is the
single Hung Up, recorded in 2005.
3. Madonna has spent more time in the top 5 than any other singer.
In the first five of the British hit parade, 46 tracks by Madonna visited. Only Elvis had more.
Moreover, Madonna’s presence in the top 5 has been stable for three decades: from the song
Like a Virgin in 1984 to Celebration in 2009.
4. Her US Super Bowl Performance Broke All Records.
In the 1980s there was no Google search engine to mathematically evaluate people’s interest in
Madonna and other artists. However, if we take the period from 2010, then the peak of interest in
Madonna came in March 2012, when she entered the arena of the Super Bowl in American
football. Before that, for eight years, from the moment Janet Jackson’s strap slipped and her
breasts were exposed, artists were not invited to perform in this most coveted television show for
the American public.
The period of distrust of female singers ended with the advent of Madonna.
5. Sadness and joy in Madonna’s compositions are not readable by a computer.
Streaming services rank tracks by assigning them a score on a scale of “hilariousness” – a
computer determines how sad or happy a song is based on the musical scale (major or minor),
tempo, and other properties of the composition.
The artificial “ear” evaluates only the music, ignoring the words – but it recommends that users
read when they choose what to download and listen to new.
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Based on their ratings, Spotify’s algorithms rank Madonna’s earlier tracks as more positive, and
later ones as rather sad.
Of course, the machine cannot take into account the depths of the lyrics – and therefore, most
likely, it perceives songs differently than a person.
The most dramatic, even tragic compositions of Madonna belong to the early work, although
they fall into the category of “fun”.
For example, the album True Blue, released in 1986, received the highest rating as positive, even
though there are songs about teenage pregnancy, deceit, betrayal, and alienation of parents from
children.
And albums MDNA (2012) and Rebel Heart (2015) seem gloomy to the computer, although the
words in tracks like Give Me All Your Luvin’ or Girl Gone Wild do not have a hint of
despondency.
6. Madonna has a lot of songs written in the keys of G major and C major.
In Madonna’s studio albums, there are tracks in 24 different keys – but G major is the most
common (17 songs).
What does it say? G major is a rather life-affirming and, most importantly, simple tonality. And
C major, which is in second place in the list of Madonna’s favorite keys, is the most basic and
unsophisticated key with which children start learning music.
7. Madonna was the richest singer in the US in 2017.
Forbes magazine estimated the total amount of Madonna’s capital at $ 580 million. She was
much richer than all other American singers (more precisely, living and working mostly in the
USA).
Celine Dion, who occupied the second line of the rating, and Madonna overtook as much as $
200 million.
It seems that Madonna was not cunning when she sang “I am a material girl.” This statement is
backed up by numbers.
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